Heroes and protagonists, money matters, freelance editors, and Google+: you’ll find all that and more in today’s Great Stuff. Let’s get started, shall we?

CRAFT

Do “hero” or “heroine” mean the same thing as “protagonist?” In Why Your Protagonist Might Not Always Be Your Hero, Katie Weiland (@KMWeiland) explains the distinction and how you can identify who the protagonist really is. (Note that this character is not necessarily an anti-hero, either.) Katie suggests that you ask three questions to identify your protagonist:

• Who is most important to your plot?
• Who has the most dramatic character arc?
• Who has the most at stake?

Katie also continues her Most Common Writing Mistakes series with A Surefire Sign You’re Over-Explaining...

Welcome to the first full-week edition of Great Stuff! We’ve got craft pieces on info-dumping, writing sex scenes, and overusing particular words; business pieces on publishing, KDP Select, and book bloggers; floundering through social media; a tech article on how Google Glass might be used to read books in the future—or might not be; and a writing life piece on building good relationships with your readers.

CRAFT

Ah, the dreaded info-dump. If, like me, you’re a current or former professional who also writes, you can fall into the trap of killing the flow of a story by dumping information on the reader. Independent editor Jodie Renner (@JodieRennerEd) provides strategies for providing Info with Attitude that get the key things the reader needs to know across while keeping the action ...

It’s the Ides of March—beware! It’s about to be St. Patty’s Day—rejoice! (But don’t drive afterwards.) Some big news about Google Reader, in case you hadn’t heard, along with our usual supply of Great Stuff.

CRAFT

I’ll let you in on a secret. When Lisa Cron (@lisacron) asks, Does Your Protagonist Have Amnesia?, she’s really asking about you, not your hero(ine). Why? Because, she says, that character’s past is her prologue, what leads to the change she needs to make over the course of the story. If you’ve forgotten to develop the critical details of that past (and not the 1,000-question list of irrelevant details some writing teachers advocate), you won’t know the how and why of the past that makes that change critical...